Moreover, the localisation of various departments of the trade within Lancashire is still more remarkable. Not only have the old mills in which spinning and weaving were carried on together given way before division of labour, but the two processes are mostly conducted in different districts, the former in the towns immediately around Manchester, the latter in the more distant northern circuit. Nor is the specialisation confined to this. Spinning is again divided according to the coarser and finer qualities of yarn. The Oldham district, with Ashton, Middleton, and other towns south of Manchester are chiefly confined to the medium numbers. Bolton, Chorley, Preston, and other northern towns undertake the finer numbers. In weaving there is even more intricate division of labour, each town or district specialising upon some particular line of goods.[120] Moreover, it must be borne in mind that the substitution of the factory for the domestic system and the continual enlargement of the average factory indicates an important progressive concentration. So the cotton industry does not in fact cover nearly so large a local area as when it was one-hundredth the size. The same is true of the other chief branches of the textile and metal industries. Nor is it only in the manufactures that towns and districts are closely specialised. The enormous increase of commerce due to machinery of manufacture and of transport requires the specialisation of certain towns for purely commercial purposes. London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Hull are more and more devoted to the functions of storage and conveyance. Manchester itself is rapidly losing its manufacturing character and devoting itself almost exclusively to import and export trade. The railway service has made for itself large towns, such as Crewe, Derby, Normanton, and Swindon. Cardiff is a portentous example of a new mining centre created when the machine development of England was already ripe.
The specialisation of function in a large town is, however, qualified in two ways. The strong local organisation of a staple trade requires the grouping round it of a number of secondary or auxiliary trades. In large textile towns the manufactures of textile machinery, and of subsidiary materials, are found. The machine-making of Manchester is one of its most important industries, furnishing the neighbouring textile towns. Leeds is similarly equipped for the woollen trade. This is one of the respects in which the superior development of the English cotton industry over the continental ones is indicated. In Alsace alone of the continental centres has the concentration of industry advanced so far as to furnish a local machine industry specially devoted to cotton machinery. Germany is still mainly dependent upon England for her machines.[121] So likewise with regard to co-ordinate trades, there is an advantage in the leading processes being grouped in local proximity, though they are not united in the same business. Thus we find dye-works and the various branches of the clothing trade largely settled in the large textile towns, such as Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Bolton. The unit of local specialisation is thus seen to be not a single trade, but a group of closely allied trades, co ordinate, dependent, and derivative.
Round some large industries in which men find employment minor parasitic industries spring up stimulated by the supply of cheap abundant labour of women and children. In metal and machine towns such as Birmingham, Dudley, Walsall, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and other shipbuilding towns, where the staple industries are a masculine monopoly, textile factories have been planted. The same holds of various mining villages and of agricultural villages in the neighbourhood of large textile centres. There is in the midland counties a growing disposition to place textile factories in rural villages where cheap female labour can be got, and where the independence of workers is qualified by stronger local attachments and inferior capacity of effective trade union organisation. As textile work passes more and more into the hands of women,[122] this tendency to make it a parasitic trade thriving upon the low wages for which women's labour can be got where strong and well-paid male work is established, will probably be more strongly operative.
§ 13. The specialisation of certain districts within the town, though far less rigid than in the mediæval town, is very noticeable in the larger centres of industry. Natural causes often determine this division of localities, as in the case of the riverside industries, brick-making and market-gardening in the outer suburbs. Round the central station in every large town, for convenience of work and life, settle a number of industries related to the carrying trade. Every trade, market, or exchange is a centre of attraction. So the broking, banking, and the general financing businesses are grouped closely round the Royal Exchange. Mark Lane and Mincing Lane are centres of the corn and tea trades. In all town industries not directly engaged in retail distribution there are certain obvious economies and conveniences in this gregariousness. Agents, travellers, collectors, and others who have relations of sale or purchase with a number of businesses in a trade find a number of disadvantages in dealing with a firm locally detached from the main body, so that when a district is once recognised as a trade centre, it becomes increasingly important to each new competitor to settle there. The larger the city the stronger this force of trade centralisation. Hence in London, untrammelled by guild or city regulations, we find a strong localisation of most wholesale and some retail businesses. In retail trade, however, the economic gain is less universal. Since retail commodities are chiefly for use in the home, and homes are widely distributed, the convenience of being near one's customers and away from trade competitors is often a predominating motive. Shops which sell bread, meat, fish, fruit, groceries, articles which are bought frequently and mostly in small quantities, shops selling cheaper articles of ordinary consumption, such as tobacco, millinery, stationery, and generally shops selling articles for domestic use, the purchase of which falls to women, are widely dispersed. On the other hand, where the articles are of a rarer and more expensive order, when it is likely that the purchaser will seek to compare price and character of wares, and will presumably be willing to make a special journey for the purpose, the centralising tendency prevails in retail trade. So we find the vendors of carriages, pianos, bicycles, the heavier articles of furniture, jewellery, second-hand books, furs, and the more expensive tailors and milliners clustering together in a special street or neighbourhood.
Effective competition in retail trade sometimes requires concentration, sometimes dispersion of business. But the most characteristic modern movement in retail trade is a combination of the centralising and dispersive tendencies, and is related to the enlargement of the business-unit which we found proceeding everywhere in industry. The large distributing company with a number of local branch agents, who call regularly at the house of the consumer for orders, is the most highly organised form of retail trade. In all the departments of regular and general consumption the movement is towards this constant house-to-house supply. The wealthier classes in towns have already learned to purchase all the more perishable forms of food and many other articles of house consumption in this way, while the growing facilities of postage and conveyance of goods enable them to purchase from a large central store by means of a price-list all other consumables into which the element of individual taste or caprice does not largely enter. This habit is spreading in the smaller towns among the middle classes, so that the small dispersed retail businesses are becoming more and more dependent upon the supply of the needs of the working classes, and of such articles of comfort and luxury as may appeal to the less regular and calculable tastes of the moneyed classes. Just as in towns we have a constant automatic supply of water and gas instead of an intermittent supply dependent on a number of individual acts of purchase, so it seems likely that all the routine wants of the consumer will be supplied.
How far mechanical inventions may be applied to increase the facility and cheapen the cost of this distribution it is difficult to say. The automatic machine for distributing matches and sweetmeats is adaptable to most forms of routine consumption. In the larger stores many kinds of labour-saving machinery are already applied. As steam or electric power is adopted more widely in the local transport services the retail distribution of goods from a large single centre is likely to proceed apace, and a displacement of human labour by machinery similar to that which is taking place in manufacture will take place in distribution. So far as the wants of large classes of the public become regular and their consumption measurable in quantity, machinery will unquestionably take over the labour of distribution, especially in the large towns which are absorbing in a way convenient for mechanical distribution a larger proportion of the consuming public. With each new encroachment of machinery into the domain of the distributing trades the characteristics of machine-industry, enlarged mass of the business, increased area of the market, increased complexity of relations to other trades, increased specialisation of local activity will be clearly discernible.
We thus see in the several departments of industry, under the pressure of the same economic forces, an expansion of size, a growing complexity of structure and functional activity, and an increased cohesion of highly differentiated parts in the business, the market, and in that aggregation of related trades and markets which forms the world-industry. The physical instrument by which these economic forces, making for increased size, heterogeneity, and cohesiveness,[123] have been able to operate is machinery applied to manufacture and transport. Moreover, each new encroachment of machinery upon the extractive and the distributing industries brings into prominence within these processes the same structural and functional characteristics.
Comparative Value of Foreign Trade in European Countries.